Abstract
Jupyter notebooks provide an interactive programming environment that allows writing code, text, equations, and multimedia resources. They are widely used as a teaching support tool in computer science and engineering courses. However, manual grading programming assignments in Jupyter notebooks is a challenging task, thus using an automatic grader becomes a must. This paper presents UNCode notebook auto-grader, that offers summative and formative feedback instantaneously. It provides instructors with an easy-to-use grader generator within the platform, without having to deploy a new server. Additionally, we report the experience of employing this tool in two artificial intelligence courses: Introduction to Intelligent Systems and Machine Learning. Several programming activities were carried out using the proposed tool. Analysis of students’ interactions with the tool and the students’ perceptions are presented. Results showed that the tool was widely used to evaluate their tasks, as a large number of submissions were performed. Students expressed positive opinions mostly, giving feedback about the auto-grader, highlighting the usefulness of the immediate feedback and the grading code, among other aspects that helped them to solve the activities. Results remarked on the importance of providing clear grading code and formative feedback to help the students to identify errors and correct them.
Highlights
The Jupyter notebook is an open-source tool where users have an interactive programming environment for scientific computing, which allows writing code, text, equations, and multimedia resources [1]
This section is split in two parts: the first one is focused on the related works and tools that provide Jupyter notebook auto-grading capabilities; the second part is intended to give a background on the kinds of feedback provided by software tools designed to support students in their learning process of courses related to computer programming
We presented UNCode notebook auto-grader, where students can obtain summative feedback related to programming assignments and detailed formative feedback in an instantaneous way
Summary
The Jupyter notebook (previously known as IPython Notebook) is an open-source tool where users have an interactive programming environment for scientific computing, which allows writing code, text, equations, and multimedia resources [1]. Jupyter notebooks have been recently used as a teaching and learning supporting tool in academic institutions, such as: Universidad Complutense de Madrid [4], BVB College of Engineering and Technology [5] and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [6] They have been used for teaching in different areas like radiology [7], geography [8], geology [9], among others [10]. Jupyter Notebooks have become the preferred computational notebook in many computer science areas [2,3,6], as well as in different science areas and courses [7,8,9,10] They are used as a teaching and learning supporting tool in academic institutions [4,5]. This section is split in two parts: the first one is focused on the related works and tools that provide Jupyter notebook auto-grading capabilities; the second part is intended to give a background on the kinds of feedback provided by software tools designed to support students in their learning process of courses related to computer programming
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